


(Your Love Has Made Me Enter) Cities of Sorrows

by Miss_M



Category: Lawrence of Arabia (1962)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Angst, Arguing, Developing Relationship, M/M, Religious Imagery & Symbolism, Sexual Content
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-06-19
Updated: 2019-06-19
Packaged: 2020-02-26 23:05:38
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 6,258
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/18726676
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Miss_M/pseuds/Miss_M
Summary: Ali did not consider himself a fanciful man, but he thought it would be a pity if the Englishman perished in the desert.





	(Your Love Has Made Me Enter) Cities of Sorrows

**Author's Note:**

  * For [Rhovanel](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Rhovanel/gifts).



> Title is adapted from [“An Ode to Sadness”](https://glli-us.org/2018/02/20/arabian-love-poems-full-arabic-and-english-texts/) by the Syrian poet Nizar Qabbani, translated by Rachel Schine.
> 
> I own nothing.

At midmorning, the sky over the desert resembled a bowl of polished copper filled with water. The heat haze rendered distances deceptive, and the ever-present light filled the eye so it could see nothing else, neither danger nor salvation. Rocks, camels, thorny bushes, persons became pillars of dust, tricks to lure the eye away from the one constant: the sun’s path across the earth. 

The first time Ali saw Lawrence – Al Orens, as Ali would name him an unimaginably short time later – the Englishman looked like a desert creature, tall and thin and dressed in too-few, too-tight clothes the color of the sand. Not a jinn, though, nothing so fearsome. More like a ginnaye, a guardian spirit – perhaps auspicious, perhaps not. In any case, not a trespassing Hazimi. That alone was sufficient for Ali to leave the Englishman alive, though not enough to take the stranger under his protection. 

When he came close enough to see the stranger’s eyes, Ali had to reconsider his initial amused reaction to this poorly dressed figure, now alone in the vastness: uncanny eyes the color of the Nile’s deep water, or the dancing gas flames which Ali had seen illuminating Cairo when he had lived there as a schoolboy. Perhaps the stranger was a jinn after all. His insolent manner, seemingly unconcerned about either his aloneness in the desert or the rifle slung on Ali’s saddle, suggested he harbored no fear of either hostile men or the sun. 

“My fear is my concern,” the stranger told Ali while reclaiming his compass. 

Ali smiled at such untested courage. The man with the jinn’s eyes spoke like boys before their first raid on a rival clan, their boasts reaching to heaven while their hands remained yet unstained with blood and atremble with fearful anticipation. 

“God be with you, English,” Ali replied before he rode away. 

He would have offered the same blessing to those boys setting off to become men or die in the attempt. He had met many English before, and French, and even Germans, both in Cairo and later in Prince Faisal’s company. They tended to sweat a lot and turn red even when they kept out of the sun. They wore silly clothes and gestured with the entire length of their arms, like they believed the whole world belonged to them. The stranger at Masturah Well had been possessed of the same easy arrogance, the same foolhardiness. Yet his eyes seemed to follow Ali, like the midday heat shimmer already gathering in the air. 

Ali did not consider himself a fanciful man, but he thought it would be a pity if the Englishman perished in the desert. God, in His mercy and wisdom, could be very sparing with miracles, yet Ali suspected that the Englishman carried a miracle or two in his pockets, without yet fully realizing how fortunate he was.

 

*

 

Despite his amused speculation about the Englishman’s fate, Ali stopped short in more displeasure than amusement when he entered Prince Faisal’s tent and recognized the yellow head of the man sitting with his back to the open tent flap. As though he had no fear of enemies sneaking up on him, or were merely a fool.

Not a fool, if he had found his way from the well to Faisal’s encampment with nothing more than his compass and his own blind luck. _God must love fools_ , Ali’s father had been fond of saying. _This is why He made them in such multitudes._

“Did he tell you about the lost gardens of Cordoba?” Ali asked from the deeper darkness beside the tent and took a small, mean, but sweet pleasure in the sight of the Englishman starting at a voice addressing him from the inky night. A jinn, startled. 

“He likes to talk about them,” Ali said, venturing out into starlight and the reddish castoff glow of a nearby fire. 

Lawrence stood still, as though he thought immobility would make up for his undignified start from a moment ago, and watched Ali approach. 

“It makes him feel like a prince of something more than a silly little people,” Ali continued, circling Lawrence, keeping his empty hands in plain sight while his body hemmed the Englishman in. “A barbarous and cruel people.”

Lawrence’s words should not have stung so much, nor should Prince Faisal asking the Englishman to linger, for Ali’s prince was a curious man, covetous of knowledge. It seemed to Ali that all empires were alike, whether the Arab one of old or the English one of now. Their curiosity always served as an advance guard for their covetousness. Therefore, in Ali’s opinion, empires were not to be trusted, but Ali chose to leave such affairs to Faisal. Anyway, Ali’s pride should have overcome both the stranger’s words and the prince’s caprice, yet he could not resist the temptation of flinging Lawrence’s words back at him like hot coals. 

“Only kings build pleasure gardens, you see. My prince feels like more of a king when he dreams of them.” 

_He does not truly favor you_ , Ali thought fiercely, wondering if the jinn could hear his unspoken thoughts. _He cannot, for he is too wise and wary to be seduced by nothing more than a few pretty words prettily delivered. This is a moment’s favor, it will pass._

“The dream lets your prince feel like Semiramis,” Lawrence said in his odd, soft voice, like a dawn breeze. 

Ali inclined his head. “I know who that is.”

“Yes.” The Englishman was smiling. “And you can read and write too. I remember.” 

He moved away from Ali then and walked into the darkness between the tents, still as tall as a pillar of dust. Ali’s hand had fallen to his scimitar grip, whether in anger at the Englishman’s mockery of him or belated offense at Lawrence comparing Prince Faisal to a woman, he did not know for certain. He stood still, racked between indecision and righteous fury, for only a moment, before he remembered that no honorable man would chase down an unarmed opponent and run him through from behind. He unclenched his fingers from the scimitar and went to find his own tent. They would have to make a very early start tomorrow: all deserts should be entered before the heat of day set in, but the Nefud was more than just a desert and would require much, much more from them all.

 

*

 

Lawrence jerked his hand away from his camel’s long, yellow teeth and said something sharp and unintelligible. 

Ali grinned – he would have recognized the tone of a man cursing his poor luck in any language.

“Camels are foul creatures,” Ali said and patted his own camel on the neck, a safe distance away from its mouth. “Ill-tempered as children, but useful.”

He watched Lawrence’s hand, long and bony as the rest of him, turned brown by the sun, hover in the air for a moment longer before he settled for patting his camel on the neck, as he’d seen Ali do. So: not too proud to accept correction. Ali remembered also how his own pride would not allow him to resist driving the correction home. Only the previous day, he had flicked the Englishman’s thigh with his riding crop, then flicked Lawrence with his words as well, when he’d noticed the tall figure swaying too much in the saddle, his mind adrift in the sand and heat and his body soon to follow suit.

“All creatures great and small,” Lawrence murmured, seemingly more to his camel than to Ali. “The Lord God made them all.”

Ali’s smile dropped. Could English not refrain from mocking him? “What is that?” he demanded.

“A nursery rhyme.” 

Lawrence recited a few lines in English. Ali stared into those blue eyes, trying to divine whether he was meant to understand by sheer force of will or was being set up for yet another jest.

“What is a nursery?” he asked after a moment. His mouth felt bitter and foul. He needed water, but they had stopped to rest, not to drink. 

“A room in which the English keep their children separate and safe and unable to ruin their parents’ amusements.”

Ali barked a laugh, startling himself as well as Lawrence, who raised sandy eyebrows in a sun-reddened face and favored Ali with a long, frank look. 

“The rhyme is meant to teach children about the wondrous varieties that God has wrought,” Lawrence explained.

The urge to laugh mingled still with the inclination to give in to anger in Ali’s breast. “Do English children not know animals?” he asked, wondering at his own light tone. 

Lawrence smiled. “Not camels, they don’t.”

“And you call us barbarians!” 

Ali laughed much more heartily than he felt, was rescued from his own foolishness by Lawrence inclining his head, still smiling, and touching his heart, then his brow, as though he were deferring to Ali’s wisdom in the matter, though Ali knew better by now than ever to assume the Englishman would be led by anyone, when he could follow his own dubious counsel.

 

*

 

As his father’s eldest living son and the leader of his men, Ali felt always as though God had given him ten eyes in his head in the place of two. Thus he could keep watch everywhere, he could see everyone and their doings at all times – every brewing feud and fledgling alliance – but in the Nefud, when his ten eyes should have been most vigilant, he found that at least half of them strayed always to the same spot in the middle of the caravan, where the Englishman rode alone on his camel, with his two ragged servants and his strange notions swirling around him almost like a visible cloud. 

This was madness, Ali knew. It would get his men killed. It would bring God’s anger down upon them all.

“You are an even bigger fool than I thought, English,” Ali thundered at Lawrence after the Englishman announced he was turning back for the man Gasim, lost through no fault of anyone’s but his own. A man in the desert might look like a pillar of dust, but he was only a tiny swirl of sand, thrown up by a breeze and soon dispelled, swallowed back by the desert, the only true reality. 

“A man is nothing. Water is everything, and the group together,” Ali tried to explain, even through his rage. He should have saved his breath and his sweat. He should have run the Englishman through with his scimitar that day at the well. “Water and the will of God, that is all.”

As he watched Lawrence’s upright form walk away from him, back to his camel, Ali knew that his anger wasn’t really for Gasim, nor even for himself – it was for the blue-eyed jinn who had turned Ali’s good sense upside down and persuaded him to go on this journey to tempt all of God’s good favor. 

“Damn you,” Ali whispered to the sand under his feet, standing as though alone in the midst of his men, while the sun beat down on him. There was no illusion of shimmering water in the noonday sky – only the polished copper of an inverted bowl cupping fire between sky and earth.

 

*

 

English spoke the name of God easily and often, but he only had faith in himself. After the Nefud, Ali had no choice but to accept that God held the blasphemous Englishman safely in His hand. What could Ali do but follow suit? 

“Nothing is written,” Lawrence had said, but his life seemed cleaved into stone, and Ali wondered if this was what sun-blindness was like. Not the darkness of true blindness, such as had beset Ali’s grandfather in his last years, but the inability to perceive anything save the bright pinwheel of fire at the center of everything. So he gave in to the madness, embraced it as God’s will, and dressed the Englishman in the white robes of his people and named him one of his own. Perhaps half of Ali’s ten eyes following Lawrence’s every move would make sense now. 

Or perhaps there was worse madness to come. Two days after Lawrence rejoined the caravan with Gasim half-dead in the saddle behind him, they reached the arid grey hills above Aqaba.

“Where are you going, English?” Ali demanded when he caught sight of Lawrence walking away from the camp, into the hillside darkness, alone as usual. “Haven’t you had enough adventure for now?”

“I am going to take a look,” Lawrence said, softly, calmly, ever the picture of reason though his mind must be more awhirl than a dervish’s. “You should come too.”

Ali wanted to ask by what logic he should come, and what it would profit them all to have their leader and the odd Englishman act as scouts. Instead he rose, checked that his pistol and his scimitar were at his belt, and followed Lawrence uphill to look at the city and the star-like fires of the Turkish garrison.

“Aqaba. Tomorrow we shall take it,” Lawrence said with his customary conviction, underlain always with a note of fervor. _Like a prophet_ , Ali thought.

“Do you think we shall?” Ali asked, reminding himself that he had accepted the Englishman’s inhuman self-confidence as God’s own truth.

“Oh yes.” That fervor again, coming through more strongly now. “If you are right about the guns pointing at the sea rather than the hills. And I think you are right, Sherif Ali.” 

He had not used Ali’s name before, except in dispute, a battle of words. Ali found he had no words suited to the moment.

Lawrence turned his head away from the city and faced Ali in the darkness. Lawrence’s hand, the skin dried and toughened by the Nefud, took Ali’s hand and lifted it, and Lawrence’s cracked lips pressed a burning kiss into the back of Ali’s hand. Fire and water together – the burning trace of English’s skin and breath, the moist saliva. _A kiss can seal a bond of friendship or kinship, but jinn delight in cruelty and trickery. Do they ever bugger men to death?_ Ali wondered idly, shivered at the thought and the cold wind coming off the sea and the nighttime desert’s breath. _Do their kisses consume with the fire in their hearts and eyes?_

The moment hung in the air like a bell, a sweet shiver between heaven and earth, belonging to neither. Then cries of anger, the beginning of violence, rose up the hillside from the camp below, and Lawrence let go of Ali’s hand and rose quickly to see what the trouble was.

Ali could still feel Lawrence’s mark on his skin, like a fresh brand, while he watched the Englishman shiver and raise his pistol and carry out the sentence over Gasim. _Like princes of men, God too can be full of caprice._ Ali inhaled sharply at his own blasphemy. _It was Gasim’s time, it was written thus, nothing more_ , he told himself sternly while Lawrence staggered away from the corpse cooling on the sand.

Ali followed. 

Lawrence dropped the pistol on the ground before pushing aside his modest tent’s flap and bowing like an old man to go in. Ali picked up the pistol, tucked it into his own belt, and moved the tent flap aside when it had barely sighed closed after Lawrence.

The Englishman was curled up on his sleeping rugs, on his side, like he had been wounded in the stomach. He clutched his middle and breathed heavily. 

“Ali.” His voice wavered in a way Ali was unused to hearing. A plea, or a complaint, or the last sob of a proud soul wanting to be spared the weight of another’s eyes?

“You’ve never taken a man’s life, have you?” It came to Ali all at once that Lawrence’s education had not prepared him to lead men, merely to look at them and listen to them and think about their futures. He felt again, for the first time in a while, wounded anger at Lawrence’s great difference from himself.

“No,” came the reply, weak with shame, filled with one’s own diminishment. 

Ali was crouching over Lawrence in the low tent, and though the darkness was as close as a second skin, he noticed the turning of Lawrence’s head, the shift of those white-clad shoulders. Though his back was turned, Lawrence was watching him in supplication.

Ali lowered himself to his knees on the rug beside Lawrence’s hip, and reached to turn the Englishman more toward himself, so Lawrence lay almost on his back. Then Ali reached for the layered robes and moved them aside, easy as a man who has lived all his life in such clothes. Easy as a man remembering how another had done this for him once.

Hassan had been the man’s name, and he had been a companion of Ali’s youth, some years older than him. Hassan had been by Ali’s side when they learned to hawk, and to hunt, and to shoot. And after Ali’s first raid on another Bedu tribe, when Ali had lain shivering in his tent, consumed with the memory of his first kill – a man with grey and black in his beard, his eyes very wide when Ali had ridden him down and shot him – Hassan had lain behind Ali, his longer body pressed against Ali’s, and he’d taken Ali in his hand and brought him off in a few easy strokes. They’d done it often after that, sometimes when nothing else served to settle their nerves after a clash of arms, and sometimes just for the pleasure of another’s warmth and surrender.

Hassan had been killed in a fight with the Howeitat, of all people, years past. Ali spared a wry smile for that, while Lawrence stiffened quickly in his grasp, and shuddered under his touch, and said his name like a prayer. Though a man grown, he was so far gone in his inner storm that he finished as quickly as a green boy, almost as soon as Ali grasped him and stroked him firmly.

“Sleep now, Orens,” Ali said before Lawrence could say something truly foolish. “All is well.”

There was no shame in it, no more than in Lawrence’s execution of Gasim, and God wrote this too. Or perhaps Ali himself did, but he thought he felt God’s indulgence over the moment, while he rose and left Lawrence’s tent and picked up a handful of sand to rub Lawrence’s cooling stickiness from his skin.

Ali should have known that nothing involving Lawrence could stay the course for long. The man brought turbulence in his wake wherever he went.

After they had taken Aqaba, and after Lawrence had shrugged off Ali’s praise while the sea lapped at their horse’s hooves, and after Lawrence had sent Ali away and gone to Cairo to tell the English of his, the lone Englishman’s, great triumph, Ali saw that he had started to believe in him, in Lawrence, rather than the mirage of a unified Arab nation. He saw how he had been blinded, at his well, in Faisal’s tent, in the Nefud, and in Lawrence’s tent. He saw what a blasphemy his belief had been, truly a way for a servant to think and to behave. 

He did not think about Lawrence grasping weakly for his arm when Ali had had him in hand. He did not think of Lawrence’s soft voice speaking his name, nor of Lawrence’s breath, broken like a dying man’s, when he’d spilled over Ali’s fist. He would not think about that. He would put steel in his spine and fire in his heart. If he did not allow himself to be claimed, he could not be discarded either.

“He lied,” Auda said to Ali as they watched the Englishman leave them. “He is not perfect.” But then Auda had got what he wanted – glory and money, though he’d had to share the glory and the money proved to be printed paper rather than immutable gold. Ali had not known what it was _he_ had wanted, but he knew that whatever it was, he had not got it.

 

*

 

“So you have returned,” Ali said. “And what is it us humble barbarians can do for you now, Orens? Move a mountain? Bridge a sea, perhaps? Whisper your wishes in God’s ear and hope for a favorable answer?”

Lawrence seemed not quite himself, in a way that Ali could not identify at once. His eyes slewed away from Ali’s fierce gaze. His hands plucked at his robes – the same robes, cleaned and mended, or had he had identical ones made in Cairo, Ali wondered. Did the gift matter more than the appearance it allowed Lawrence to present to the world?

Ali had told himself that if he ever saw Lawrence again, he would treat him as he had done that day at Masturah Well and that night in Prince Faisal’s tent. He would not allow the jinn’s blue fire to dazzle him again.

“Well?” he said, sharp as a rifle crack. 

Lawrence smoothed down his robes and spoke to Ali’s tent rather than to Ali’s face. “In Cairo, at the officers’ club, there is a fountain. Do you…?” He hesitated. Ali had not thought him capable of hesitating. “Do you know what that is?”

Ali considered shooting him, or at the very least socking him in the jaw. “A shadirvan,” he said thinly.

“Yes, a shadirvan. Precisely. Only it was decorative rather than useful. No one drank from it, nor washed their hands and feet in it. If they had done, they’d have been thrown out and probably court-martialed. It was for pleasure alone. The sound of trickling water, never-ending, made me think of the world ocean, which the Greeks said encompassed all the known and inhabited lands.”

Ali glanced up, into the shadows clustered under his tent. “You are forever showing off, English.”

Lawrence looked on the verge of smiling, relieved. Like he knew he had done Ali an injury in the manner of his leaving and so must handle his return in a very particular way. 

“That sound nearly drove me mad,” he confessed.

Ali shook his head: one could no more expect a camel not to bite when annoyed than a man to change his nature. 

He approached Lawrence, his black robes brushing Lawrence’s white ones, embraced him and kissed him on both cheeks. 

“Welcome back, my friend.”

 

*

 

Lawrence had told Ali that most Englishmen, if they ever thought of Arabia at all, imagined it as a land of nothing but sand and sun, where nothing grew, no water pooled or flowed, and no snow ever covered the stony mountains. Ali pointed out that this explained multitudes about the mad country that had spawned Lawrence. 

In the winter, in the mountains, sheltering in caves and abandoned strongholds of tribes which no one remembered any more, they warmed themselves with arguing as much as cook fires. All ten of Ali’s eyes were focused on Lawrence in those moments, and Ali knew his men were watching them too, yet he could not spare any of himself for them. In the throes of disagreement, all of him was for Lawrence.

“Deraa is heavily garrisoned,” Ali said. “It is not merely madness to go there, but your shayatin pride whispering to you.”

Lawrence stood and moved into the next chamber, the one in which he slept alone. Ali had one too, while the men clustered together in threes and fours – they were the warmer for it, while Ali and Lawrence enjoyed the cold solitude of their rank.

Ali followed. A rug strung across the entrance separated their forms, though not their voices, from the men.

They fought about the love the men had for Lawrence, and the love that Ali had for him, and how easily Lawrence could squander that love to feed his self-regard and give nothing back. A man could love his prince, his father, his wives and children, his friends. Lawrence was many things.

To lead men was to give as well as receive, but the English only ever took and took for themselves.

“Do you think I’m just anybody, Ali? Do you?” Lawrence demanded, like a peacock asking if it was pretty, if it was magnificent, if it overshadowed all the other birds that walked and flew.

“I think that you should have learned to kill men sooner, then you would not seek to be punished for it and lead us all into danger,” Ali threw back at him.

Lawrence went still, as though carved in stone. “Is that what you think?”

“That is what I know. If you want to be punished, let me fetch my whip. I would be happy to oblige.” Ali sketched a mocking bow. “My lord.”

Lawrence still did not move, nor speak, and so Ali turned and went to his own chamber, with its own rug hanging over the door. He would set one or two men to watch Lawrence’s door during the night, just in case the stubborn ass decided to sneak out in the night and ride to Deraa all alone. 

Ali turned around on the spot, not knowing whether to pick up the English primer Lawrence had brought him from Cairo, or to pick up his Quran, or to try to sleep. His heart thumped in his chest, and a whisper of footsteps made him turn once more and stop still. 

Lawrence stood just inside the door, wrapped still in his blanket, his eyes like deep wells. 

Ali knew that look. He had not seen it since the night when Lawrence had executed Gasim, but he could not have mistaken it for anything else.

“Ali,” Lawrence said. “I…”

His hesitation lent strength to Ali’s decision. He opened his arms, as though greeting a brother or an ally, and said softly: “Come here, my friend.”

Lawrence dropped his blanket and came to Ali, almost in a rush, like a man approaching an oasis days after his water skins had run dry.

Ali embraced him, long bones under the skin, pale again since the onset of winter. Ali ran his hand from the back of Lawrence’s head down to his tailbone. Lawrence’s spine was a bridge spanning worlds, and his hands shook as he seemed to fight Ali’s embrace, till he got his hands between them and fumbled among Ali’s robes. His fingers still treated Arab clothing like a novelty, but he handled Ali’s flesh with an assurance that made Ali hold his breath for a long moment, before he put one hand firmly on the back of Lawrence’s neck, bowing the Englishman’s head to his shoulder, and reached for Lawrence with the other.

They breathed deep and softly, like the waves soughing on the beach at Aqaba, and matched their rhythm to each other, Lawrence’s breath warm on Ali’s face and his slick, firm flesh even warmer in Ali’s hand. 

“Ali, I…” Lawrence said again, his grip on Ali tightening almost painfully, his face contorting. “I must…”

Ali watched him like he was a stranger, then he remembered their argument from mere moments ago. A horsewhip. Punishment. But Ali was not a cruel man. He did not delight in pain.

“If that is what you want,” he said, tugging on Lawrence more sharply to make him pay attention. “If that is what you want, then kneel.” 

For all that he had fumbled with Ali’s robes, Lawrence removed his own swiftly, a billow of white like almond trees dropping their petals on the hillsides. He knelt on Ali’s rugs and sat back on his heels, his hands curled on his thighs, for all the world like a man about to pray toward Mecca.

Then Lawrence leaned forward, rested his weight on his hands, and arched his back, all his pale skin offered up in sacrifice, and Ali thought: _Blasphemy. Blasphemy._

He had mocked Lawrence silently for his trembling hands, yet Ali’s own hands shook as he disrobed and fell to his knees behind Lawrence. He had been breathing through his mouth, so it took some effort to bring up saliva. He spat into his hand, cupped as though to receive clear water, and reached between Lawrence’s buttocks.

Lawrence shivered, as though he would pull away. “No. Not that.”

He spoke in his normal tone, unconcerned for who might hear, but Ali replied in a whisper, for he knew the men were listening for any sign of where their argument stood. They had all heard Ali offer to whip Lawrence. 

“I have no rose oil, Orens. Be still, or you will be in no shape to ride tomorrow.”

Lawrence shuddered under Ali’s questing hand and spoke a sentence in English. The letters ran together, but Ali’s grasp of the language was not yet good enough to understand rhymes or puns. 

“What?” he asked sharply and spat again into his hand. 

“The trick is not minding that it hurts,” Lawrence said in Arabic and rocked his hips back, and Ali understood that he was about to sport with a madman. He had always known this about Lawrence, but the knowledge came over him with a new clarity. 

A shiver ran down Ali’s spine, not due to the cold of the mountain fastness, but because Lawrence shook like an unbroken horse when Ali took hold of his hips and steadied him. Ali resisted the urge to make soothing noises as he took himself in hand and plunged into Lawrence’s tightness, trying to pant without sound as he worked his hips and took Lawrence fully, Lawrence gripping and dragging against him, pushing back against him for more, Lawrence’s wordless voice ululating with want. 

So Ali gave him more. He never could deny Lawrence anything. 

His knees hurt on the rug-covered stone floor, and his hands gripped Lawrence like an enemy. He buggered Lawrence, Al Orens, the mad Englishman, like he would have done a slave, or a war captive, or a man who would take Ali’s everything as his due and give nothing but his absolute, self-assured surrender in return. 

Ali’s knees could take no more without relief. He sat back on his heels, shifting his weight back and pulling Lawrence backward with him, Ali’s chest pressed to Lawrence’s back with no layers of cloth in between, nothing but skin sheened with sweat. _I am his throne_ , Ali thought fleetly, furiously. Ali moved Lawrence easily, fiercely up and down his shaft, watched Lawrence take him and disgorge him, and did not try to offer Lawrence the relief of his hand. The peculiar bloodlust he felt would not be sated except in having its fill, and so Ali took Lawrence like his own property, took him and used him and listened to Lawrence’s cries of want, like a hawk falling on its prey, feeling Lawrence’s flesh and Lawrence’s voice spur him on.

While they’d knelt, Lawrence had been bent forward, low on Ali’s lap, held fast between Ali’s legs and Ali’s torso, his hands pressed to the floor. Now his weight rested on Ali and his right hand vanished from Ali’s sight, and the tendons in his forearm stood out, and Ali thought, not for the first time, of Lawrence’s great greed – he was given everything, and still he took more. 

Ali let his voice wing out of him as on a gust of wind, no words save sounds of need and taking and being given, gone sunblind as he spilled in the tight crevice of Lawrence’s body and listened to Lawrence’s shrill, wordless voice in response. Ali’s hand, splayed on Lawrence’s bare stomach, felt the desperate clenching and trembling of Lawrence’s muscles as he was used to his heart’s content. Lawrence’s arm trembled, his veins like ropes, his body shaking on Ali’s lap like he was possessed. Ali knew that the men could hear everything. He knew also that, somehow, this would not change their love for Lawrence, and Ali was their lord always. 

Ali slumped forward, over Lawrence’s bent back, softening inside him, unwilling yet to be parted. 

“You are not going to Deraa,” he said, gulping the cold air, shivering in his and Lawrence’s sweat. “We will bypass the city and go on to Tafas, a smaller place. If you want Damascus, you should reach for Damascus, not play with garrisoned towns like knucklebones.” 

Lawrence said nothing, but for once Ali knew that the Englishman would swallow his pride and obey him. He knew that the men could still hear them. He peeled one sweaty hand from Lawrence’s hip and gripped the hair brushing Lawrence’s neck between his fingers, pulling Lawrence’s head back and pressing his open mouth to Lawrence’s flushed throat, Lawrence’s voice crying out his name whistling in his ears like the last cool breeze before a desert dawn.

 

*

 

The English believed the desert to be empty, just a deadly nothing, but Ali found in Damascus – its depopulated streets, its confusion of houses and alleys, its wires crossing the sky and tram tracks spanning the ground – the same effect: everything swirled together to obliterate the senses.

He had never truly wanted Damascus. This had been his prince’s and Lawrence’s desire, and so Ali had taken Damascus as a love token for them both. He had not thought beyond the taking, but he recognized at once the chaos which followed: tribes arguing amongst themselves, proud lords and sherifs squabbling over electrical generators and water mains. One could kill a man over access to a well, but this thing the English called civilization struck Ali as a folly and a mirage to rival anything the desert jinn might throw up to mislead an unwary traveler.

He was arguing with Lawrence again, after the Arab National Council – the Englishman did love to say that phrase again and again, like a magic charm or a prayer – dissolved like water trickling away between one’s fingers. He was arguing with Lawrence again, yet the fire in Ali’s belly was different and new, not just the warm pull which had drawn him to Lawrence from the beginning. 

“We _must_ hold the city,” Lawrence insisted, his eyes wide and wild, as they could get when he desperately wanted Ali to reassure him that he was in the right. 

“For what?” Ali demanded. “For Lord Faisal, or for General Allenby, your lord king, for England? For what?” 

“For me!” Lawrence cried, as though pleading with Ali to see him and understand him. To give him his heart’s desire because Ali had never refused him anything. 

Ali straightened up, so he was almost as tall as Lawrence, and gathered a scoff and a sneer around himself like a cloak. 

“At last,” he said, “the truth. ‘They are going to win their freedom. I’m going to give it to them.’ I read that in Jackson Bentley’s newspaper. His writing, but your words.”

“You read that, did you?” Lawrence asked with the air of a man who had called another silly and little while drinking from his well without permission. 

“I did. In plain English. I had a good teacher.” 

Lawrence could scoff too. “You read the words, but not their meaning. You have understood nothing.” 

Ali’s hand was on his scimitar. He had not reached for it while talking to Lawrence in many months. An ending between men could not pass without violence. “I have understood that to you we were nothing more than an ornament for your pride, an amusement. A sideshow!”

Lawrence laughed, and Ali truly would have killed him then, except one did not kill a friend easily, however violent the parting. 

“Do you know,” Lawrence said as though relating an idle story picked up by a campfire, “that is precisely what I was told in Cairo, before they let me come to the desert that first time? That all this would be but a sideshow of a sideshow. But they were wrong, Ali. _They were wrong._ ” His eyes burned again, that blue jinn flame which drew in and consumed. 

Ali took a step back – his flesh was no man’s to burn up for amusement or nourishment. “No, they were not wrong. Your masters were more honest than you, _Al Orens_.” 

He watched to see if Lawrence would flinch at Ali flinging that name back at him, and was duly rewarded. Silence thickened between them, and Ali took another step back, to fortify it.

“Ali…” Lawrence began, the plaint of a man needing to be told he was good and had acted well, wanting another’s flesh to fill him and hold him up so that he would not crumble.

Ali turned away swiftly, so as not to see or hear. “Go back to them now. Go back to your masters and tell them of your great success,” he said and left Lawrence alone in the meeting hall.

He spotted Auda lingering in the shadows of the courtyard, but the old Howeitat had wiliness and wisdom enough not to accost Ali at such a moment. Ali imagined his face was warning enough, even in the thick darkness of a city without electricity. The only light came from the full moon reflected in a still pool of water in the center of the courtyard. 

Ali strode past the moon in the water, passed under a stone arch, and out to the dark and silent street. He walked on without looking back, and no voice called him back to his doom, no voice rang out from the abandoned meeting hall, that abode of this city’s jinn.


End file.
